pulling you out of my seams
only to stitch myself up again.
tell me how to live off of my own nectar
when it's your honey I crave.
the body feels pain
but forgets it so quickly.
that's why while running to you
i'm never scared to skin my knees again.

We picked at each other like scabs.
Now all that's left are scars.

January fluttered by like the
'I love you’s' caught in her throat.
Cigarette embers of white smoke
shed on the coat tails of winter.
The morning frost licks her broken chest cavities
as blood bubbled across your wooden floor.
Warping wood of collapsing ceilings
crushed the life you sparked inside-
splinters too deep to pull.
I've never been a simple creature-
anxiously stirring in a silent house.
I want to tell you how I feel.
Compose it into a mellow tune
I want it to be soft and beautiful.
I hope we will meet under
the yellow kitchen light again.
But maybe,
you're gone forever.

I want to start over. I want to feel your eyes on mine. Feel like the moon connected to the tides.

Instead, you could slip through my fingertips at any second. A tide that never comes in once it goes out.

Honey only for my lips, and salt for an after taste. Loving you is a bittersweet thing.

With you, the ground felt solid
like I could pull myself from
this flooding basement, for good.

Skin drenched,
slippery shaking freezing skin.
You stretched your hands out,
held me till I grew warm.

The waves swelled
the surface grew rough.
With my finger tied to yours
you cut them loose,
left me to drown in myself.

How silly of me-
to think that I could flourish
in someone else's chest
when I can't stand
being trapped in my own.

Silly, silly, stupid girl.
You will always be alone.

Your bitter words make me
want to burn my tongue with tar.
It won't be these cigarettes that **** me-
but my family's words.

With your breath heavy from whiskey
you were never good after drinking a bottle.
Hot tears fall as you tell me to grow up.
I can't.

I keep
crushing my sunflowers in my palm.
Bleeding yellow and green earth
through white knuckles.
A gold that once littered our bedroom floor
between the articles of clothing.

I keep
praying for rain to quench the soil
but there's only deathly heat.
Apologies to the gods go unheard.

No one wants to listen to a girl crying
that her flowers are dead from the doing of her own hands.

We met between lipstick stained
beer bottles on the blue fabric sofa.

Struggling to hide the reasons for splinters and chapped lips,
fear slides over my tongue as I started to split open again.

Warning signs hang from her neck
of the broken heart clogging the kitchen sink,

he'll follow the footprints of others
through the broken glass without a glance. (Keep yourself safe)

But then, Saturday night in the dimly lit stairway,
you tell me to take my time,

not everyone is the same.
You would wait and prove it to me.

You kissed my scars and gave me band-aids
for the cuts, that hadn't quite healed yet.

It's been five months since I've felt like I'm drowning,
and you're the reason I can breathe again.